Platform9 Announces General Availability of Managed Kubernetes and Fission Project!

Since the launch of the company, which I was pleased to be able to cover a lot of exciting changes and growth with Platform9 over the last couple of years. What began as the OpenStack-as-a-Service focus has expanded to embrace both feature additions within the OpenStack offering as well as the addition of Docker and Kubernetes management.

Platform9 Announces General Availability of Managed Kubernetes

Kubernetes is gaining momentum in a way that has been unseen since Docker stormed onto the containerization scene in recent years. From much of what I’ve seen in the market and among customers and community members investigating container orchestration, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard from what it seems at this point.

So, what does Platform9 bring to the table with managed Kubernetes? This is the ideal merger of bringing the k8s platform to an organization without the pain and overhead to manage:

complexity of architecting the infrastructure

operational overhead and engineering for resiliency

operational processes to maintain and upgrade the k8s control plane

risk of embracing the k8s platform

In the same way that Platform9 has simplified and delivered OpenStack using a SaaS model, we are seeing the same opportunity arise for folks to put container orchestration into their IT portfolio. The candidates who have been actively using the beta program for managed Kubernetes were a combination of both traditional virtualization shops, and more forward leaning container and cloud friendly organizations.

Having taken a few test drives with alternative products like the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), I can easily see the attractiveness of Kubernetes, and even more so with a managed service approach. ECS gives the option for containerized workloads on your AWS environment, but it also means:

IAM integration that can be challenging (or poorly implemented)

proprietary nature of the container lifecycle on ECS

“lock-in” which is a result of the proprietary stack and workflows

one-destination for your infrastructure (build on ECS…for ECS)

Container and cloud friendly organizations are already embracing the value of automation, and will be likely to also have many more open technologies as a part of their IT portfolio.

Platform9 Announces the Fission Project

The Serverless phase of infrastructure is becoming one that is getting a lot of attention. Many push back on the importance of it mostly out of the fear that it is only going to be available as a cloud-based service, or that running the infrastructure requires a lot of care and feeding which may offset the benefits in some ways.

What if we just want to run code, and not have to worry about all of the tooling underneath the covers? With K8s already on board, there is now an excellent option to provide Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS), or what we know as Serverless infrastructure, using Fission for Kubernetes.

When you installed Docker the first time and typed “docker run”, you saw a little magic happening. We call that the “Aha! moment” where you realize that this is something very cool that is also only the beginning of the possibility for it. Kubernetes takes a lot more care and feeding to get to that point, but once you’re there you are going to realize how easy it is to consume as an abstraction layer above the infrastructure.

Now that Kubernetes is under the covers, you can also add Fission into the mix and bring another very interesting open source platform into your arsenal of tools.

The challenges being solved by Fission include:

moving to code-only deployments for development

Lambda-like functionality on-premises or wherever you have k8s running